Greetings from the UK

[endomorph]

Hi all.

New to the site so I thought I would drop in and introduce myself. To save repeating myself, here is my photographic bio -

Born the son of a graphic designer cum audio-visual and television producer whose artistic eye I think I inherited, since an early age I have admired photography & photographers.


At he age of 15, I took my first “proper” scenic photographs from my sisters yacht, moored in Tollesbury Creek, very early in the morning when the sea was like a mirror, using a Kodak disposable camera. Surprisingly, the photographs came out remarkably well and with only a small amount of hand-finishing (no Photoshop in those days ! ), I framed them. 25 years later, they hang on my office wall, in the same frames, looking as stunning as ever and reminding me of where I came from.


Over the years I have had a variety of cameras and currently I use a Sony Alpha A390 DSLR along with a selection of specialist lenses and filters. Two of my great passions in life now are travel and photography. I believe that travel broadens one’s view of the world. Experiencing other cultures, meeting people from other communities and other countries and seeing the beauty, and sometimes ugliness, of the world has helped me understand that all of our lives are at once interconnected and individual.


It has made me better appreciate my own home and culture as well as that of the people I’ve met and the lands I’ve seen and I have become a much more tolerant person as a result. Through my photography I seek to document my own personal experiences, to capture scenes and events as I see them and to share with others the beauty and diversity of the world I’ve seen. As the images of other photographers have inspired me to explore the world, I hope my own contributions will inspire others to do the same.


I view the art of photography as a subtractive process, a distilling of reality into a personal vision. As such I often use the tools of modern photography – software, filters, digital enhancement – to try to capture in an image the emotions I felt at the moment I tripped the camera’s shutter.


Before I begin photographing a subject, I try to imagine how I would like it to appear in the final image. I will start by making an image with this in mind, but rarely will it become one of my favourite pictures of the subject. As I photograph, I will experiment and try to capture the subject from multiple perspectives and with different lighting conditions. I will often return to a subject several times until I am satisfied with the result.


My goal in photographing a subject is to capture both the nature of the subject and my personal point of view. I am not trying to solely document the scene, but rather I am trying to permanently record the particular aspect or quality of the subject that I find interesting.



You can find my work at JSW Photography